How does Qos work?

I have a WRT54GS router and wanted to limit 'son' to allow me to get a decent connection. He is connected to ports 3 and 4 (PC and Xbox360). I have set the Qos on these ports to 1M but it doesn't really seem to make any difference. I still have to wait ages for pages to d/l on my PC when his connections are active.

I dont have that router so i can just speculate, but does that tell you which direction that is or give you the option to choose. I have a few different routers that have QoS built in but they give me the option to set them to traffic types. If you are setting it to 1M and its inbound then you are not going to feel or see the difference as I am pretty sure your isp up load is not 2M or greater. If its download, then maybe your ISP can support it, but he still could be saturating your upload. Does the Qos functionality give you the granularity to choose which direction from the routers perspective to apply those settings?